Storage policy between the Virtual Machine Sharing Disks in Multi-Writer mode may show conflict policy information on the UI.

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

When virtual disk is shared across multiple virtual machines thru Multi-Writer mode the storage policy of the virtual disk at the time of creation should automatically picked up.

Symptoms:
When two virtual machines VM1 with storage policy Policy-1 and VM2 with storage policy Policy-2 are created and later additional disks from VM1 (with Policy-1) is shared to VM2, we see that the storage policy Policy-2 is incorrectly displayed on the UI for the shared disk when viewed from VM-2 though the policy on the backend is Policy-1.

Environment

VMware vSphere 6.5.x
VMware vSphere 7.0.x
VMware vSphere 6.7.x

Cause

This is currently a known issue with Storage Policy based management, when we attach a shared virtual disk to another VM it assumes the default policy name of the target VM instead of enforcing existing policy name of the VMDK which was already created with a policy.

Resolution

VMware is aware of this issue and working to resolve this in a future release.

Workaround:
While adding a shared disk to additional VMs ensure to select the correct policy from the source VM from where the shared-disk is being added during "Add existing hard disk" wizard to avoid conflicting Policy names in the UI post addition.